It’s “a strange thing”, muses a peasant in Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Notebook (1852), “when the old order passes and there’s no new one to take its place.” Ovsyanikov has witnessed the brutality and avarice of rich landowners and wonders: “Must I really die without really seeing any new system in action?”
The peaceful transfer of power with our first democratic election in 1994 was hailed as a “miracle revolution”. But it wasn’t a revolution at all. I have only to glance out of my window to see three separate communities: a wealthy white cluster tucked snugly into this valley, a dilapidated “coloured village” overlooking the harbour, and the raggedy black shantytown growing in size and squalor as shacks creep up the mountainside.
Perhaps this is merely a deceptive interregnum: like the liberal, bourgeois lull in Russia between the overthrow of the Tsar in March 1917 and the Bolshevik seizure of power in October.
In the 19th century, the Russians had a term for westernised liberals who were repelled both by Tsarist absolutism and the cult of violence among young, usually university-educated revolutionaries. The expression took its name from Ivan Turgenev’s novella, Diary of a Superfluous Man (1850), and came to stand for those, like Turgenev, who felt themselves stranded: recognising that their values were out of kilter with the times while still trying to maintain high hopes.
Here, stunned by the corruption corroding almost every institution, one senses that many former anti-apartheid rebels, now feel like “superfluous men”. At the other end of the spectrum you can again hear colonial platitudes from jittery whites, captured in another story from Turgenev’s Sportsman’s Notebook. The narrator is stuck in a railway carriage with the assured Zverkov, pontificating on “what was what”. Talking of “the servant class”, Zverkov rebuts opposing opinions: “That’s all very fine, but ... you’ve got no idea what sort of people they are.”
So, the next time you hear anyone lament, “such a pity SA’s going the way of other independent African nations”, do remind them of the role played by western companies. Bell Pottinger self-imploded because of its PR villainy. Now international accounting firm KPMG and consulting giant McKinsey are shown to have sold their corporate souls, auctioning their global imprimatur to sprinkle perfume over Zuma’s coterie of pickpockets.
There’s a set response when caught: indignant denial, followed by “we’re looking into it”, then a few employees being fired.
Finally, to stem the damage, there’s a limp apology from head office, ritually concluding: “That’s not who we are.”
Oh yes it is!
This all goes back further; first to the 1999 arms deal, when British, French and German firms paid bribes yet not one of the really corrupt was brought to book. It rolls back over centuries. The French enlightenment philosopher Denis Diderot considered one of the worst effects of empire to be the corrupting effect it had on Europeans. While my colonising ancestors would have been familiar with the cautionary moral offered by Edward Gibbon in Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, they were probably not aware of the opening sentence of Gibbon’s very first essay: “The history of empires is that of the miseries of humankind.”
Our current miseries may merely be “a halt in the mud”, as a former revolutionary described France in the 1830s, where self-serving opportunists quickly rose to the top. The novelist Stendhal defined it as the “age of charlatanism without talent”. Stendhal also records Napoleon’s euphoria on being crowned emperor in 1804. “Splendid ceremony,” he crowed, to which one republican general replied: “You’re right, nothing was missing except the 2-million men who died to overthrow what you have just restored.”
So, what about the far more than 2-million poor South Africans who have been mugged of their expectations by our own head of state? He is our new emperor without clothes (or morals), for whom the invocation of “revolution” is merely a cloak to hide his personal colonisation by the highest bidders.
On the principle of “willing seller, willing buyer” we have corporates willing to buy political access and ministers or officials all too willing to sell. Manifestly, the Zuma presidential era is our “age of charlatanism without talent”, but it is too early to tell whether this is merely a halt in the mud, or if we are being sucked into a long-term, glutinous quagmire.
• Rostron is a journalist and author.
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.